My son spent a summer with his girlfriend at the U of Wisconsin. (She’s a grad student at Columbia.) They were astounded at how much less food cost there than in NYC. So I agree with others, you may need to check local grocery store prices or give her the cost of the meal plan for the first month and have her save receipts and see what is more realistic.
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My daughter goes to school in Massachusetts, not Boston though, she shares a lot of grocery costs with one of her roommates (they enjoy cooking together). We give her $50 per week, but I think she spends around $35. That’s less than one day of three meals on the meal plans at her school.
We do take her for a big shopping when we drop her off in August to stock up a pantry, and we do send care packages of favorite Asian items to cook with a few times a year.
If she will be living at home this summer, use it as a trial period. Let her prepare her own meals as if she were in her apartment, and track her spending. That should give her some idea of what her meals will cost. If her college is in a more expensive town, you can adjust the costs to reflect this.
Happykid’s university had a commuter meal plan that rolled over from one semester to another until the meals and snack dollars were all gone. I bought that for her first semester, figuring that it would guarantee one meal a day, as well as random snacks when she didn’t have any cash on her. She ended up packing lunch and cooking more than I had expected, and the plan lasted pretty much until the end of the first year. I offered to pay for one the next year, but she turned the offer down as she had figured out how to make everything work. If I can find the spreadsheet, I can give a better breakdown of what we spent after she used up that meal plan, but I’m pretty sure she paid for most of her groceries out of her own earnings by then.
Fixing/cooking food is substantially cheaper than meal plans. Seriously, a cup of Greek yogurt, piece of toast, and coffee made at home is not $13-14 (per meal cost at my daughter’s school the last time I calculated it, including the bonus bucks!). It does take time and a bit of organization, as well as easy access to a grocery store.
Even on summer internship at a different college, it cost a lot less to ship her an inexpensive kitchen starter set of pans etc, that she gives away at the end of the internship than to buy an optional meal plan or eat out all the time.
I bought mine a small commuter meal plan first year, she doesn’t need it anymore.
Food budget may also differ for different people. A large athletic person may eat substantially more than a small non-athletic person.
I do same as @momofthreeboys . D gets $400/month. That’s her living allowance (excluding rent) for everything, including groceries, local transportation, household expenses, personal expenses, clothes, football tickets, concert tickets, etc. She’s in an expensive city, and I know she spends more than that.
I give my son $100 every two weeks for groceries and basic miscellaneous items. I also purchased a campus meal plan that included a few flex dollars and 70 block meals so he could grab meals on campus during the semester.
He cooks dinner several nights and has left overs. He sends pics of the dinners he prepares and we enjoy knowing that he is making this work. We will re-evaluate next year but not sure if we will change anything.
If I remember correctly, I think I gave my D $150/month plus another $50/month in dining dollars so she could have lunch at the several campus cafes instead of going back to her apartment. She and her roommates did share some dinner meals and she learned to eat leftovers to stretch her money. I did set her up pretty well at the beginning of the semester with paper goods, spices, condiments, that sort of thing.
I’ll be another voice for making it possible for her to eat on campus, at least a couple of times a week. It’s helpful in catching up with friends and for those times when you don’t have time to cook.
I like @NEPatsGirl 's strategy of setting her up with pantry staples. Maybe an Amazon Pantry box at the start of the semester?
This discussion about money has taken place multiple times.
I want to clarify…my $50 a week was for groceries only. We did not fund discretionary spending like eating out at restaurants and going to concerts, or sporting events, or any other personal expenses. Our kids had jobs to pay those bills.
ETA…if either kid had indicated they didn’t have enough money to buy food, we would have increased the amount. They never complained.
Thanks everyone! great suggestions.
Also, HelloFresh has a student price of $50 a week for three meals. My D and her roommate would order and split the cost a couple of times a month when they were sure they would have the time to cook. She goes to school in a city so it actually was cheaper than grocery shopping. For non-HelloFresh weeks I gave her $70 for food.
We did the minimum meal plan (basically, dining dollars to the tune of about $500/semester) for S2 so he could grab something for lunch or on-campus snacks. We also gave him $100/mo for groceries. He had a PT job, so he could supplement the groceries or spend his earnings on other activities. We were not subsidizing restaurants and delivery. He had no complaints, and because he likes cooking, he liked looking for good deals and interesting ingredients. We would also send him back to school with some staples.
S1’s college required a full meal plan if one lived on campus. For S1, that was a total waste of $$ because he doesn’t eat a wide variety of foods and he would forget to go to the dining hall.
I didn’t know you could do helloFresh on an as needed basis. That would be great (for me, not my daughter)